President Trump is scheduled to meet with “members of the video game industry” next week, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced today. There were no details about the meeting, such as who might be in attendance, but it will focus on “what they [the industry]” can do about America’s gun violence problem.

So here’s how this is going to play out: We get a splashy meeting with the heads of EA, Activision, and the like. Trump says something profoundly stupid (i.e. I can’t believe so many people die in Overwatch! 30 million died just yesterday!), it gets mocked by white guys on late night TV, and then Trump continues his diarrhea of a presidency. And somehow in the face of this incredible incompetence the Democrats don’t flip either chamber in the fall, because 'Murica.

I don’t really see this amounting to anything other than political theater. It’ll be “I talked to EA/Activision/whatever and they’re Working On It!”, as yet another attempt to deflect national attention away from the ongoing conversation about gun control. It’s this or further tank his ratings by doing what he clearly wants to do in trying to scream the outspoken Parkland survivors out of existence.

We’re going to see the usual rerun of 90s gamer paranoia and it’ll be just as embarrassing as it ever was, ignore it and focus on voting in your state for every midterm election that you can.

Tired: meeting with industry executives to criticize the role of shooters in disseminating US imperialist propaganda
Wired: meeting with industry executives to regulate virtual guns instead of real ones

Agree, this is an definitely an attempt to Do Something and Take This Issue Seriously, but I honestly don’t think the paranoia will spring back up, at least not like it did in the 90s. You can only go to that well so many times and, more importantly, a 40 year old parent today was an actual 15-year-old back when Joe Lieberman was breathlessly warning about teens Mortal Kombating each other on the playground. It’s hard to fear monger when the very people you’re trying to scare have lots of benign experience with the thing you’re trying to scare them about.

I mean, wasn’t the big selling point of this presidency to install a solidly conservative SCOTUS that would reverse previous rulings? Are video game protections really that off limits to a court has its sights set on a rollback or defanging of Roe v Wade?

It’s been a disguisting sort of pleasure seeing The Gamers implode over this. They’re torn between “I TRUSTED TRUMP TO AT LEAST GET THIS RIGHT!!!” and “this is all Anita Sarkeesian’s fault, somehow”

This stops being funny when you remember they did this for net neutrality too and somehow did a bunch of mental backflips to blame it on anyone else but the responsible parties and this is why this country is basically hell